"Although Facebook now requires every political ad to “accurately represent the name of the entity or person responsible,” the social media giant acknowledges that it didn’t check whether Energy4US is actually responsible for the ad. Nor did it question 11 other ad campaigns identified by ProPublica in which U.S. businesses or individuals masked their sponsorship through faux groups with public-spirited names. Some of these campaigns resembled a digital form of what is known as “astroturfing,” or hiding behind the mirage of a spontaneous grassroots movement... Adopted this past May in the wake of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign, Facebook’s rules are designed to hinder foreign meddling in elections by verifying that individuals who run ads on its platform have a U.S. mailing address, governmental ID and a Social Security number. But, once this requirement has been met, Facebook doesn’t check whether the advertiser identified in the “paid for by” disclosure has any legal status, enabling U.S. businesses to promote their political agendas secretly."

So, political ad transparency -however faulty it is -- has only been operating since May, 2018. Not long. Not good.

"On Sunday evening, US law enforcement contacted us about online activity that they recently discovered and which they believe may be linked to foreign entities. Our very early-stage investigation has so far identified around 30 Facebook accounts and 85 Instagram accounts that may be engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior. We immediately blocked these accounts and are now investigating them in more detail. Almost all the Facebook Pages associated with these accounts appear to be in the French or Russian languages..."

This happened after Facebook removed 82 Pages, Groups and accounts linked to Iran on October 16th. Thankfully, law enforcement notified Facebook. Interested in more proactive action? Facebook announced on November 8th:

"We are careful not to reveal too much about our enforcement techniques because of adversarial shifts by terrorists. But we believe it’s important to give the public some sense of what we are doing... We now use machine learning to assess Facebook posts that may signal support for ISIS or al-Qaeda. The tool produces a score indicating how likely it is that the post violates our counter-terrorism policies, which, in turn, helps our team of reviewers prioritize posts with the highest scores. In this way, the system ensures that our reviewers are able to focus on the most important content first. In some cases, we will automatically remove posts when the tool indicates with very high confidence that the post contains support for terrorism..."

So, Facebook deployed in 2018 some artificial intelligence to help its human moderators identify terrorism threats -- not automatically remove them, but to identify them -- as the news item also mentioned its appeal process. Then, Facebook announced in a November 13th update:

"Combined with our takedown last Monday, in total we have removed 36 Facebook accounts, 6 Pages, and 99 Instagram accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior. These accounts were mostly created after mid-2017... Last Tuesday, a website claiming to be associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russia-based troll farm, published a list of Instagram accounts they said that they’d created. We had already blocked most of them, and based on our internal investigation, we blocked the rest... But finding and investigating potential threats isn’t something we do alone. We also rely on external partners, like the government or security experts...."

So, in 2018 Facebook leans heavily upon both law enforcement and security researchers to identify threats. You have to hunt a bit to find the total number of fake accounts removed. Facebook announced on November 15th:

"We also took down more fake accounts in Q2 and Q3 than in previous quarters, 800 million and 754 million respectively. Most of these fake accounts were the result of commercially motivated spam attacks trying to create fake accounts in bulk. Because we are able to remove most of these accounts within minutes of registration, the prevalence of fake accounts on Facebook remained steady at 3% to 4% of monthly active users..."

That's about 1.5 billion fake accounts by a variety of bad actors. Hmmmm... sounds good, but... it makes one wonder about the digital arms race happening. If the bad actors can programmatically create new fake accounts faster than Facebook can identify and remove them, then not good.

"... a $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group during the 2016 presidential election, he was out of the company he founded. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during congressional testimony earlier this year, called Luckey's departure a "personnel issue" that would be "inappropriate" to address, but he denied it was because of Luckey's politics. But that appears to be at the root of Luckey's departure, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday. Luckey was placed on leave and then fired for supporting Donald Trump, sources told the newspaper... [Luckey] was pressured by executives to publicly voice support for libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, according to the Journal. Luckey later hired an employment lawyer who argued that Facebook illegally punished an employee for political activity and negotiated a payout for Luckey of at least $100 million..."

"At the start of 2019, French regulators will launch an informal investigation on algorithm-powered and human moderation... Regulators will look at multiple steps: how flagging works, how Facebook identifies problematic content, how Facebook decides if it’s problematic or not and what happens when Facebook takes down a post, a video or an image. This type of investigation is reminiscent of banking and nuclear regulation. It involves deep cooperation so that regulators can certify that a company is doing everything right... The investigation isn’t going to be limited to talking with the moderation teams and looking at their guidelines. The French government wants to find algorithmic bias and test data sets against Facebook’s automated moderation tools..."

Good. Hopefully, the investigation will be a deep dive. Maybe other countries, which value citizens' privacy, will perform similar investigations. Companies and their executives need to be held accountable.

Then, on November 14th The New York Times published a detailed, comprehensive "Delay, Deny, and Deflect" investigative report based upon interviews of at least 50 persons:

"When Facebook users learned last spring that the company had compromised their privacy in its rush to expand, allowing access to the personal information of tens of millions of people to a political data firm linked to President Trump, Facebook sought to deflect blame and mask the extent of the problem. And when that failed... Facebook went on the attack. While Mr. Zuckerberg has conducted a public apology tour in the last year, Ms. Sandberg has overseen an aggressive lobbying campaign to combat Facebook’s critics, shift public anger toward rival companies and ward off damaging regulation. Facebook employed a Republican opposition-research firm to discredit activist protesters... In a statement, a spokesman acknowledged that Facebook had been slow to address its challenges but had since made progress fixing the platform... Even so, trust in the social network has sunk, while its pell-mell growth has slowed..."

The New York Times' report also highlighted the history of Facebook's focus on revenue growth and lack of focus to identify and respond to threats:

"Like other technology executives, Mr. Zuckerberg and Ms. Sandberg cast their company as a force for social good... But as Facebook grew, so did the hate speech, bullying and other toxic content on the platform. When researchers and activists in Myanmar, India, Germany and elsewhere warned that Facebook had become an instrument of government propaganda and ethnic cleansing, the company largely ignored them. Facebook had positioned itself as a platform, not a publisher. Taking responsibility for what users posted, or acting to censor it, was expensive and complicated. Many Facebook executives worried that any such efforts would backfire... Mr. Zuckerberg typically focused on broader technology issues; politics was Ms. Sandberg’s domain. In 2010, Ms. Sandberg, a Democrat, had recruited a friend and fellow Clinton alum, Marne Levine, as Facebook’s chief Washington representative. A year later, after Republicans seized control of the House, Ms. Sandberg installed another friend, a well-connected Republican: Joel Kaplan, who had attended Harvard with Ms. Sandberg and later served in the George W. Bush administration..."

The report described cozy relationships between the company and Democratic politicians. Not good for a company wanting to deliver unbiased, reliable news. The New York Times' report also described the history of failing to identify and respond quickly to content abuses by bad actors:

"... in the spring of 2016, a company expert on Russian cyberwarfare spotted something worrisome. He reached out to his boss, Mr. Stamos. Mr. Stamos’s team discovered that Russian hackers appeared to be probing Facebook accounts for people connected to the presidential campaigns, said two employees... Mr. Stamos, 39, told Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general counsel, about the findings, said two people involved in the conversations. At the time, Facebook had no policy on disinformation or any resources dedicated to searching for it. Mr. Stamos, acting on his own, then directed a team to scrutinize the extent of Russian activity on Facebook. In December 2016... Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Zuckerberg decided to expand on Mr. Stamos’s work, creating a group called Project P, for “propaganda,” to study false news on the site, according to people involved in the discussions. By January 2017, the group knew that Mr. Stamos’s original team had only scratched the surface of Russian activity on Facebook... Throughout the spring and summer of 2017, Facebook officials repeatedly played down Senate investigators’ concerns about the company, while publicly claiming there had been no Russian effort of any significance on Facebook. But inside the company, employees were tracing more ads, pages and groups back to Russia."

"There are a number of inaccuracies in the story... We’ve acknowledged publicly on many occasions – including before Congress – that we were too slow to spot Russian interference on Facebook, as well as other misuse. But in the two years since the 2016 Presidential election, we’ve invested heavily in more people and better technology to improve safety and security on our services. While we still have a long way to go, we’re proud of the progress we have made in fighting misinformation..."

So, Facebook wants its users to accept that it has invested more = doing better.

Regardless, the bottom line is trust. Can users trust what Facebook said about doing better? Is better enough? Can users trust Facebook to deliver unbiased news? Can users trust that Facebook's content moderation process is better? Or good enough? Can users trust Facebook to fix and prevent data breaches affecting millions of users? Can users trust Facebook to stop bad actors posing as researchers from using quizzes and automated tools to vacuum up (and allegedly resell later) millions of users' profiles? Can citizens in democracies trust that Facebook has stopped data abuses, by bad actors, designed to disrupt their elections? Is doing better enough?

The very next day, Facebook reported a huge increase in the number of government requests for data, including secret orders. TechCrunch reported about 13 historical national security letters:

"... dated between 2014 and 2017 for several Facebook and Instagram accounts. These demands for data are effectively subpoenas, issued by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) without any judicial oversight, compelling companies to turn over limited amounts of data on an individual who is named in a national security investigation. They’re controversial — not least because they come with a gag order that prevents companies from informing the subject of the letter, let alone disclosing its very existence. Companies are often told to turn over IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, online purchase information, email records and cell-site location data... Chris Sonderby, Facebook’s deputy general counsel, said that the government lifted the non-disclosure orders on the letters..."

So, Facebook is a go-to resource for both bad actors and the good guys.

An eventful month, and the month isn't over yet. Taken together, this news is not good for a company wanting its social networking service to be a source of reliable, unbiased news source. This news is not good for a company wanting its users to accept it is doing better -- and that better is enough. The situation begs the question: are we watching the fall of Facebook? Share your thoughts and opinions below.